Heavy Metal
Row after row of silver bricks lie stacked aboard the sunken S.S. Gairsoppa, torpedoed in the North Atlantic by a Nazi U-boat in 1941. The Odyssey Marine Exploration salvage company this month announced it had retrieved 48 of the 240 tons of silver in the British merchant steamship's hull.
The 412-foot (126-meter) Gairsoppa currently resides nearly 3 miles (4.7 kilometers) underwater—deeper than the Titanic. The World War II-era vessel's silver is the heaviest and deepest precious-metal cargo ever retrieved from a shipwreck, according to Odyssey, which plans to return to the site to continue the salvage operation.
(Related: Read "Blackbeard's Shipwreck" in National Geographic magazine.)
—Kastalia Medrano
WWII Wreck Photos: 48 Tons of Silver Recovered 3 Miles Down
Forty-eight tons of silver have been freed from a shipwreck off Ireland—the deepest precious-metal cargo ever recovered, salvagers say.
